FOSS diaries of a Collaboran by the name of Frederic Plourde

Gecko on Wayland

At Collabora, we’re always on the lookout for cool opportunities involving Wayland and we noticed recently that Mozilla had started to show some interest in porting Firefox to Wayland. In short, the Wayland display server is becoming very popular for being lightweight, versatile yet powerful and is designed to be a replacement for X11. Chrome and Webkit already got Wayland ports and we think that Firefox should have that too.

Some months ago, we wrote a simple proof-of-concept basically starting from actual Gecko’s GTK3 paths and stripping all the MOZ_X11 ifdefs out of the way. We did a bunch of quick hacks fixing broken stuff but rather easily and quickly (couple days), we got Firefox to run on Weston (Wayland official reference compositor). Ok, because of hard X11 dependencies, keyboard input was broken and decorations suffered a little, but that’s a very good start! Take a look at the below screenshot🙂

Jonathon – Mozilla are working on it, but “port to Wayland” is the second step after “port to Gtk3”, which is a prerequisite for getting off X11. And that’s slow going, because unlike this proof-of-concept, they can’t cut corners with quick hacks and stuff that can’t safely be merged into the main repo…